South Africa held its first fully democratic, multiracial election
On this day · 27 April 1994
On April 27, 1994, South Africans of every race lined up together to vote, burying apartheid and sweeping Nelson Mandela toward the presidency.
For the first time in the country’s history, the queues outside South Africa’s polling stations on April 27, 1994 held citizens of every race. After decades in which the vote was reserved for the white minority, the franchise was finally universal, and the lines stretched for hours as people waited to mark a ballot that had never been theirs before.
Voting ran over several days, with turnout near 87%. The African National Congress took 62.65% of the vote, and the new National Assembly’s first act was to elect Nelson Mandela, who had spent 27 years in prison, as the nation’s first Black president.
Mandela cast his own first-ever vote in Inanda, near the grave of an early ANC founder.
The day did more than change a government. It ended the legal architecture of apartheid and reset South Africa’s place in the world. April 27 is now marked each year as Freedom Day, a national holiday commemorating the moment a divided country chose, at last, to count everyone.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
